Stories to Remember. Digital Storytelling can also be presented in an audio format similar to podcasting. Conversations on this website are recorded communication events between or among people and include the necessary roles of speaker and listener. Conversations are meant to be longer in duration to allow the speaker to delve into a topic, and for the listener to respond actively.

The participants in this project were asked a variety of questions to help them talk about the theme of resilience in their life stories for about 40 minutes. Garnet Templin-Imel was the active listener. She also managed the recording and edited the sound files. In two of the conversations, three people were present. Emilie Tang and I talked to her mother, Ting Chen. Mila Tari, an ESL teacher, and I asked her student Luis about his life in Mexico and the U.S.

While recording participant conversations initially seemed easy, capturing sound effectively is difficult. All the recordings were done using a Snowflake portable professional USB mic and a laptop computer in a quiet room. Unfortunately, the sound quality of the interviews is quite uneven with computer fan noise and some undiagnosed clicking randomly occurring throughout most of the recordings. Luis Roldan’s conversation was the only completely clean recording. Excellent recordings, however, require a soundproof room and substantially better equipment. Due to the filesize of the complete conversations, only excerpts were included on this website. To obtain a copy of any of the complete conversations, please e-mail garnet @garnetsstorygems.com.

Summaries of the complete conversations are provided on each participant page. The sound files were edited in a software application called Garageband. Coughing, sounds like “um”, and long pauses were removed; otherwise the recorded content was left intact. Excerpts between 3 to 7 minutes were made from the original sound files. These conversations are presented in a movie format on this website with one picture and music playing in the background to help establish atmosphere and to mask, in some cases, fan noise from the laptop computer recording.

Listen closely and several times. Then you will appreciate these listening legacies that Emilie, Humberto, Jaklin, Luis, Sue and Ting have so generously shared.